Linky Links

Stuff I found interesting or amusing and thought I'd share.

- The Chestnut blight is a real problem in New England. All of the Chestnut trees I remember from my childhood are gone.

- Heh heh - Homer Kardashian

- Holy crap - what a PR screw up by the Patriots!

- The numbers don't seem to make sense. How can you say something is profitable if you outlay $30 billion and only "hope" to get $5-6 billion back over 20-years?

- Napoleon's bicorn hat is up for auction

Flotsam and Jetsam

Miscellaneous thoughts and observations.

Since Kevin Youkilis was traded every MLB team has been involved in a trade except the Padres, Nationals and Mets. San Diego signed an extension with Huston Street and surprisingly was not a seller, the Nationals got back Jason Werth from the DL which is like adding the best available bat meanwhile the Mets have pretty much done nothing... MLB team Facebook pages get hacked. Tasteless yet amusing... Interesting - according to Peter Gammons if Craig Brelow throws to Ryan Lavarnway - it will be the first Yale battery since the 19th century... Wow - the hubris. Soyndra official referred to the Obama Administration as "Bank of Washington." All that taxpayer money down the drain... The plot thickens. According to Rob Bradford - Will Middlebrooks has not made two errors in one game this season - never mind two in one inning. So what was Bobby Valentine talking about? If that big detail isn't true - then what else was fabricated?... Cool - 24 vintage pictures of Abraham Lincoln... Adolph Hitler's sister-in-law was named Bridget - Bridget Hitler. That just sounds funny. Like it should be the name of an Irish punk band... According to MoneySupermarket - it would cost $282 million to be Batman...

Corn Ethanol Subsidy to Expire

Congress ends corn ethanol subsidy. 

Good news. This was one of the biggest boondoggles in US history. People are upset at wastes of money like the Solyndra "investment" - and rightly so - but the ethanol subsidy with the dollar amounts involved and the willing suspension of belief for political gain dwarfs the green money grab.

Also interesting that this public good was accomplished not by Congress being proactive and fixing a wrong but by Congress being inactive and just letting the subsidy to expire.

Flotsam and Jetsam

Miscellaneous thoughts and observations.

In today's dollars - the tea actually dumped into the harbor during the Boston Tea Party would be worth $847,000. That means the US government dumped 631 times as much money down the Solyndra sinkhole. Yet there are some people who counsel that we shouldn't be bothered by that... Las Vegas had the over / under for the Patriots / Jets game at 51 points. The final was 30-21. I am always amazed when Vegas hits the number on the head even though they do it all of the time... Secret Daytime Drinking would be a good name for a band or a fantasy football team... Andruw Jones is just 1 day older than Carlos Beltran. If you were a GM - would you risk a multi-year deal with either player?... Joe Paterno is 2-years older than Al Davis - just saying... If you took the TV series The West Wing as a whole - the real lesson is that Josh Lymon could get anyone elected President of the US... Rhetorical Hitler would also be a good name for a band or a fantasy football team...

Flotsam and Jetsam

Miscellaneous thoughts and observations.

The Bruins start their preseason schedule in five days and the Patriots look like real Super Bowl contenders. Stories of "panic in Boston" over the Red Sox are way over-blown. Seriously - stop listening to people like Dan Shaughnessy... I had Joe Mauer as a keeper in one of my fantasy baseball leagues this year. He really brought back memories of me taking Dante Culpepper with my first pick in the 2005 fantasy football draft... Dan LeBatard is Highly Questionable really started to grow on me during the week. I hope ESPN keeps it on the schedule... Who knew? The official state beverage of Indiana is water. That does make a certain amount of sense... I saw someone make this point on the Internet and it has really got me thinking. If you replaced the name "Solyndra" with the name "Halliburton" do you think the media's coverage would be different? We would have had about a dozen prime time specials about it by now... Who knew II? Humans have about 650 muscles while caterpillars have about 4,000. So if you called a really muscular person a human caterpillar do you think they will take it as a compliment?

Solyndra

So the government gave a company called Solyndra $535 million in loan guaranty money and now the company is in Chapter 11. I agree that this could and should be considered President Obama's Enron. I also agree that it looks like the company was given special treatment that may have bent or broken some rules or laws. The question now is - what to do about it?

If I was in Congress I would try to introduce a bill that would call for a special charge of $1.73 per taxpayer. If you were a head of household - you would pay that $1.73 for every member of your household. This would be a charge that everyone would have to pay. Doesn't make a difference if you are considered a student or retired and normally would pay no taxes. You would have to pay this $1.73 tax charge.

Where do I get the $1.73 figure? Well if there are 309 million people in America then the $535 million wasted on Solyndra divided by 309 million would equal roughly $1.73. If you made people pay for government waste and money given to special friends then people would start to demand a better accounting of how their tax dollars are spent. Let Solyndra stand as the first step to real fiscal responsibility where government waste would be a real out of pocket expense to the taxpayer.

I'm guessing something like that would whip people into holding their elected representatives accountable. That's why I don't think anything like what I suggest would be possible to pass into law.